Barack, Vladimir and Confucius

Critics justifiably scoffed when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2009 peace prize to President Barack Obama, less than nine months into his presidency, for … well, no one is exactly sure. The deadline for nominations was Feb. 1, only 10 days after he was sworn into office. If Obama hadn’t exactly done anything in those 10 days to merit receiving the award, at least he hadn’t done anything to disgrace it.

The same can’t be said of the Chinese committee that awarded the 2011 Confucius Peace Prize to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Never heard of the Confucius Peace Prize? Neither had I until I read about it in the Wednesday edition of the New York Times. The Chinese government created the prize last year in a fit of pique when the Nobel committee awarded its 2010 peace prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo — who actually earned it.

Taiwan’s former Vice President didn’t even know he had won, and in a very curious ceremony a couple days later, a confused-looking little girl picked up the award in his stead.

If last year’s Confucius Peace Prize was odd, this year’s is positively daffy. Among the citations for Putin’s work on behalf of peace was his decision to go to war in Chechnya in 1999:

His iron hand and toughness revealed in this war impressed the Russians a lot, and he was regarded to be capable of bringing safety and stability to Russia.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2000, a Human Rights Watch researcher described Putin’s campaign for safety and stability this way:

The evidence we have gathered in Chechnya is disturbing: Russian forces have committed grave abuses, including war crimes, in their campaign in Chechnya. Since the beginning of the conflict, Russian forces have indiscriminately and disproportionately bombed and shelled civilian objects, causing heavy civilian casualties. The Russian forces have ignored their Geneva convention obligations to focus their attacks on combatants, and appear to take few safeguards to protect civilians: It is this carpet-bombing campaign which has been responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the conflict in Chechnya.

Confucius say: “Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.”